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My month as Slate's resident Schoolhouse Rocker comes to an end today, and so with this post I hang up my blogger's keyboard. (Not entirely, actually; for the last few weeks I've been maintaining a bare-bones book blog for news about Whatever It Takes, and I'll keep that one going indefinitely.)
I'm grateful to my editors at Slate for giving me this opportunity, and I'm grateful to all the readers who wrote me with tips, suggestions, and stories about life in the classroom.
John McCain and Barack Obama aren't talking too much about education on the campaign trail these days—it probably has something to do with the whole two-wars-plus-collapse-of-capitalism thing. But nonetheless, the next president will take office at a moment of crisis and change in the public education system, and whichever candidate wins, he'll have a chance to push the conversation, and the system itself, in some new directions.
The local developments I've been writing about here—teacher-contract negotiations in Denver and D.C.; experimental schools in Los Angeles and San Francisco and the Bronx and New Haven—are crucial laboratories and test cases for national policy, and the next president will have the opportunity to expand, refine, and build on those experiments. There are some other useful steps he could take right away. He could make school financing more equitable (a Berkeley law professor named Goodwin Liu has some good ideas on how to do that). He could fund more education R&D. (You could fill volumes with what we don't know about which educational practices actually work.) And he could construct accountability models that are more precise and humane than those found in No Child Left Behind.
Both candidates have some good ideas in their education platforms and some smart advisers. And though neither candidate has moved too far away from his party's traditional approach to education, Obama seems more willing to look for new and innovative solutions, ideas that might stir up the stagnant politics of education.
To me, one of the most significant planks in Obama's education platform isn't in his education platform at all-it's in his poverty platform: his pledge to replicate Geoffrey Canada's Harlem Children's Zone in 20 cities across the United States, as public/private partnerships, with the federal government's share of the bill coming to as much as a few billion dollars. Each city's version of the program would be unique, but presumably each would include a charter school as well as intensive preschool programs, after-school tutoring, and family counseling. And I would hope that each replication would include a program, like the Harlem Children's Zone's Baby College, that would encourage parents to adopt better child-rearing strategies. (I had a piece on This American Life this weekend about Baby College and the complicated process of trying to sway Harlem's parents toward different methods.)
There are a lot of potential obstacles to Obama's pledge becoming a reality (including the fact that he will have to be elected president before he can do much about it). As I wrote earlier this month in the New York Times Magazine,
A lot of conservatives would oppose a new multibillion-dollar federal program as a Great Society-style giveaway to the poor. And many liberals are wary of any program that tries to change the behavior of inner-city parents; to them, teaching poor parents to behave more like middle-class parents can feel paternalistic. Union leaders will find it hard to support an effort that has nonunion charter schools at its heart. Education reformers often support Canada's work, but his premise-that schools alone are not enough to make a difference in poor children's lives-makes many of them anxious.
There aren't yet airtight data to prove that Canada's model works—though as I wrote earlier this month, the numbers coming out of his elementary schools are very promising. And so rather than simply cloning the Zone and airdropping it into communities around the country, Obama's replication project will work best if each city is encouraged to adapt and innovate, to compete with every other city for the best results. (As Obama said in his speech announcing the plan, "every step these cities take will be evaluated, and if certain plans or programs aren't working, we will stop them and try something else.")
Obama's "Promise Neighborhoods" could challenge the traditional division between education policy and poverty policy—between improving schools and improving the lives of poor families. Geoffrey Canada's argument is that it no longer makes sense to think of each one separately. If we try to fix the schools in a low-income neighborhood without addressing the other needs of students there, it's not a real solution to the neighborhood's problems. And it isn't enough to provide social services to poor children if their neighborhood schools are still giving them a lousy education. A true solution to the problem of underachievement in inner-city public schools is going to require more nurturing families and safer neighborhoods as well as better teachers and more accountable schools. That's the real point of the Harlem Children's Zone, and, I think, it's going to be the next chapter in the debate over schools.
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Speaking of KIPP:
In Whatever It Takes, in one of the chapters on the Promise Academy middle school, I describe the impact of the KIPP schools in the Bronx and Harlem on the Promise Academy’s leaders and staff. This was during the first few years of the Harlem Children Zone’s middle school, which were a struggle, and those KIPP schools, which had very good test results, were for the Promise Academy administrators both a standard to be aspired to and a frustrating reminder that their own students weren’t performing at the same high level as KIPP’s students.
Terri Grey, the Promise Academy principal at the time, believed the attrition issue was part of what was holding her school back. As she put it to me in one conversation, “At most charter schools, if the school is not a good fit for their child, the school finds a way to counsel parents out”—to firmly suggest, in other words, that their child might be happier elsewhere. “Whereas Promise Academy is taking the most disengaged families and students and saying, ‘No, we want you, and we’re trying to keep you here, and we don’t want to counsel you out.” That policy made it impossible, she believed, for the Promise Academy to achieve KIPP-like results.
I’m not entirely convinced that that was the real problem at Promise Academy—or that the KIPP schools in New York were actually “counseling out” a significant number of students. But I do think it’s true that Geoffrey Canada’s guiding ethic has always been to go out of his way to attract and retain the most troubled parents and students. And that makes running a school, or any program, more difficult, even if it makes the mission purer and, in the end, more important.
To me, the solution to the attrition issue, whether it’s at a KIPP middle school or the Promise Academy middle school, is the Harlem Children’s Zone’s “conveyor belt” model, which provides continuous, high-quality early-childhood and elementary education to precisely those “disengaged families and students,” so that when those children arrive in middle school, they won’t have the kind of difficulty doing demanding work as did the kids who left the Bay Area KIPP schools or who underperformed at the Promise Academy middle school in its first few years.
As Geoffrey Canada put it in one conversation I quote in my book, “The question is, can you build a system where kids in middle school won’t need these kinds of interventions in order to be successful? And my bet—I could be wrong, but this is my bet—is if we start with kids very early, and we provide them with the kind of intense and continuous academic rigor and support that they need, then when they get to the middle school and high school level, we’re not going to need those superhuman strategies at all.”
The good news, from my point of view, is that a few KIPP schools are now beginning to follow a similar model. KIPP Houston, the flagship KIPP school, is creating its own version of a conveyor-belt system, one that starts with prekindergarten for 3-year-olds and goes right through high school. To me, that’s a very promising development. And if the model spreads to other KIPP schools, I think this whole attrition debate could before long be a thing of the past.
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In my post last Friday on the Harlem Children's Zone (the subject of my new book), I referred briefly to the difficulties that the organization's charter middle school, the Promise Academy, faced while I was reporting in Harlem. On Sunday, I received an e-mail from a reader, a teacher named Derek, who had just finished the book and asked if he could "see more reporting if possible on the middle school at the HCZ; the book seemed to end with it hitting a real rocky road."
Then Diane Ravitch, a respected education historian who is a part of the Broader, Bolder Approach group I mentioned last week, wrote about Whatever It Takes on her blog for Education Week. She wrote that she found the book as a whole "very hopeful"—except for the middle-school chapters, which she found "depressing."
All of which made me think that there might be some gaps that I should fill in here regarding the Promise Academy middle school. To summarize those chapters briefly: The Promise Academy middle school opened in Harlem in the fall of 2004 with a class of 100 sixth-grade students. That first year was difficult, and the school's results on the citywide tests in the spring of 2005 were quite poor despite a lot of arduous preparation. Over the next two years, things improved gradually, but not quickly enough to prevent Geoffrey Canada from making some major changes to the school.
Each one of those first three years in the life of the school gets a chapter in my book. What I wasn't able to report there, because of my book deadline, was that in the fourth year (2007-2008) things improved significantly at the school. Test scores were up, and, from what I'm told, there were fewer behavioral problems and less antagonism between students and teachers. And after a year's hiatus in admissions—Canada decided that the middle school wouldn't bring in a new sixth-grade class in the fall of 2007—a new grade was admitted last month.
This week, the New York City Department of Education released their annual "report cards" for every elementary and middle school in the city, and the Promise Academy received an A, the highest grade, for the second year in a row. (Once you click on that link, you have to choose "Manhattan" and "District 84" to find the grades for charter schools.)
To me, though, the real point of those chapters wasn't to judge the success of Geoffrey Canada's middle school. It was to give readers a chance to ponder some of the most difficult questions in urban education today.
The first has to do with age. One of the main conclusions I reached in my book was that educational and social supports that start early in a child's life are much more effective than those that start in middle school. (Those are the "very hopeful" chapters Ravitch referred to.) Early interventions work better and faster, they involve less stress for both students and teachers, and they have the potential, I believe, to propel students to a higher level of success.
So, if we want to improve outcomes for poor children and eliminate the achievement gap, should we devote more of our resources toward preschool and elementary school, where interventions are arguably more efficient? Or should we devote more of our resources toward middle schools, even if it takes more work and more money, because that might be our last chance to rescue failing students? (My preference is to spend more money earlier, though, of course, I think you need a balance.)
The second question is one that Ravitch raised in her blog post yesterday:
Do poor black and Hispanic kids really need to be in "no excuses" schools that insist on rote learning and rote behavior? That take control of their lives and change their culture? Should this be the model for education for children of color in big cities?
Ravitch is referring to middle schools run by charter organizations like KIPP and Achievement First, which emphasize not only an intensive academic curriculum, but also "character" education, often establishing an elaborate system of rules, rewards, slogans, and punishments intended to better prepare middle-school kids to learn. She's not a big fan of those schools, and I wouldn't necessarily agree with some of her language above—I wouldn't say those schools take "control" of students' lives, and I don't think they insist on "rote behavior." But I know what she means.
And I think it's a big question. I wrote about those schools in the Times Magazine back in 2006, and since that article came out, I've continued to visit KIPP schools and schools modeled after KIPP in cities across the country. Though I try to be skeptical, I'm always impressed by the atmosphere of the schools, by the engagement of their students, and by their results. (Coincidentally, a giant report just came out evaluating the KIPP schools in the Bay Area. I've only read a bit of it, but Eduwonk says it's "overall good news.")
In fact, I think one of the big reasons for the early problems at the Promise Academy middle school is that Geoff Canada and the school's administrators and teachers weren't able to do what every new KIPP school tries hard to do, which is to settle very early on a coherent school culture and then stick to it and reinforce it at every turn. That school culture doesn't need to include KIPP-type chants and slogans, and it definitely doesn't need to involve "rote behavior." But it does need to go beyond the classroom.
I think students from low-income families in blighted neighborhoods who enter middle school way behind grade level need something more than just extended hours and expert teaching (though they need that, too). They also need adults around them who believe in them and care about them and who can guide them toward the behaviors and the mental habits that will help them succeed in school and in life. I'm not sure if I'd call that "changing their culture." But I'd certainly call it changing their minds.
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The reason I think the Harlem Children's Zone is so important—the reason I wrote a whole book about the program—is that I think it's the closest thing we have to a model for the kind of collaboration I was referring to yesterday.
What Geoffrey Canada has constructed in Harlem is a comprehensive set of integrated programs that currently serve 8,000 kids in a 97-block neighborhood, starting at birth and going all the way through college. It is based on two innovative ideas. The first is what Canada calls the Conveyor Belt—a system that reaches kids early and then moves them through a seamless series of programs that try to re-create the invisible cocoon of support that surrounds middle-class and upper-middle-class kids throughout their childhoods. The Conveyor Belt starts with Baby College, a nine-week program that provides expecting parents and parents of young children with new information about effective parenting strategies. The next stop is an all-day language-focused pre-kindergarten for 200 4-year-olds, who then graduate into a K-12 charter school that has an extended day and an extended year and employs some of the intensive academic practices developed in the KIPP schools. Throughout their academic careers, students at the school have access to social supports: after-school tutoring, a teen arts center, family counseling, and a health clinic.
The second idea is a tipping-point notion—what Canada refers to as contamination. His theory is that in a low-income, high-crime neighborhood, if you offer social and educational supports to just a few of the kids who live there, their participation will always seem a bit oddball, and they won't have much of an effect on their peers. But if you get participation rates up to 40 percent or 50 percent or 60 percent, then taking part will come to seem normal, and some of the behaviors that used to seem commonplace in Harlem—teenage pregnancy, drug use, dropping out of school—will start to seem like the oddball path. The engaged kids will "contaminate" their friends with their behaviors and attitudes.
Canada's system isn't easy. It requires a lot of hard work just to keep it in motion. And in the years that I spent reporting in Harlem, Canada and his staff made lots of wrong turns and hit plenty of dead ends. In the book, I followed one class of parents through Baby College, and some of them, it seemed, faced such big deficits and such huge obstacles in life—they couldn't read, they had had other children taken away by Child Services, they had spent a couple of years in jail—that it seemed hard to believe they would ever be truly effective parents. In the middle school, the first couple of years were quite rocky, as Canada struggled to combine the ethos of a community organization with the accountability of a no-excuses charter school.
By the time I finished my reporting, though, the middle school was starting to find its footing, and the elementary schools, where some of the students had been with the Harlem Children's Zone since Baby College, were truly thriving. The third-grade test scores last spring were good—at one charter school, 97 percent of the third-grade class was on grade level in math, and in the other, 100 percent were. (The English scores were lower, but they were still quite good. At one school, they were 10 points above the state average, and at the other they were just a point or two below the state average.)
And perhaps more importantly, the elementary schools and the kids in them felt somehow ... normal. When I spent time in the classrooms, I got the strong feeling that when these kids got to middle school, they weren't going to need the kind of heroic interventions that Promise Academy and most charter middle schools need to employ today. They wouldn't need remediation and advanced character-building and constant test prep—they would just be competent, engaged students for the rest of their school careers. And these are kids who, for the most part, came from low-income, often difficult backgrounds, with a fair number of teenage parents and parents who didn't complete high school.
They were exactly the same kind of kids, in other words, who arrived in the sixth grade in the first year of Promise Academy middle school, the ones who showed up reading three and four years behind grade level, and whose subsequent middle school careers were a constant struggle. This new generation of kids had the good fortune to find a place on the Conveyor Belt, and that meant they faced a very different kind of future than most kids growing up in Harlem.
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My interest in education and schools came about in sort of a roundabout way. In 2003, I started reporting on what was then a fairly modest social-service agency in upper Manhattan called the Harlem Children's Zone. That reporting turned into an article in the Times Magazine about the project and its founder, Geoffrey Canada, an ambitious and charismatic man in his early 50s who had come up with a unique approach to combating poverty. He had selected a 24-block neighborhood in central Harlem and was saturating the children who lived there with educational and social supports. His goal was to get them all to college and to transform the neighborhood in a single generation.
Usually when I get to the end of reporting a big magazine article, I'm pretty sick of the subject. But this time, the article felt like the beginning of a story rather than the end of one. I wanted to keep following the experiment that was unfolding in Harlem. And so I decided to write a book about it. The result, Whatever It Takes: Geoffrey Canada's Quest To Change Harlem and America, goes on sale today, a little more than five years from the first time I sat down in front of Canada and turned on my tape recorder.
There's some background on the Harlem Children's Zone in this review by Sara Mosle last week in Slate. And then, you know, there's always the book itself.
So, how did my Harlem reporting get me into writing about education? Two months after the Harlem article came out in the Times, Geoffrey Canada opened his first charter school, the Promise Academy. When the middle school opened, the administrators gave every sixth-grade student a diagnostic test. They expected that many of the children would be behind grade level; most kids in public schools in Harlem are. But when they got back the results, they were shocked by just how far behind grade level the kids were. Fifty-seven percent of the sixth-grade class was reading at a third-grade level or below.
And Geoff Canada had just promised to get them all to college.
I wanted to find out why those kids had fallen so far behind—and whether anyone had yet figured out a way to do what Canada wanted to do: take disaffected 10-year-olds who had till then received only the most threadbare education and accelerate them to a point where they were on par with their middle-class peers.
Those are some of the questions I explored in my book and which I've been blogging about, in one way or another, here on Slate for the past two weeks. Over the next few days, I'm going to write more about what I found during my time in Harlem—and why I feel it has the potential to change the terms of the country's education debate.